echoes of the old debates. >> norman mailer wanted new york city to secede. >> so did the mayor of new york. >> so did the norwegian immigrants in the upper peninsula of michigan, too. >> i any -- i think -- what i think, on the one hand i'm struck by these and troubled by these eerie resonances, and on the other hand sometimes they seem like thin reflections. and i think part of it is this romantic story, the confederate appeal is the story of a principled struggle against tyranny, especially the tyranny of the federal government that can be -- that was jefferson davis's reprieve of the real struggle. >> and wilson fell in love with it. >> it's been available since the 1870s. it fits many different types of causes. and i think you get thinner and

thinner and thinner versions of it all the time. they're still troubling, but they seem to me very watered down versions of what was being quarrelled over in 1860. and i want to try to remind myself to remember both things, that you can't take it for granted, you have to fight back against it when you see it deployed again. because the confederate story feels a little bit like some vampire story. you know, scholars keep driving a stake through its heart and saying no, this is really about slavery, and it doesn't matter. it just keeps coming back up as not about slavery. >> listen to what you said. scholars keep driving a stake through the heart. scholars. who listens to scholars? almost nobody does. >> i do. >> and i don't think jefferson davis is the key. i think that the lost cause school of interpretation took a brilliant turn very quickly, and that was disassociate this struggle from the institution of slavery. they weren't idiots. they knew that they were out of

step with the west -- the rest of the western world. so let's play down slavery. let's talk about high constitutional issues about whether the central government is powerful or the states. but that's not the key thing. the key thing is they picked the best person to focus on, and that's r.e. lee. you can talk about him without talking about slavery. you can talk about chancellorsville. a victory against the odds. you don't cast it i think so much as the states against the federal power as against the underdog waging a gallant fight over constitutional issues, and it doesn't have anything to do with slavery, especially if you pretend robert e. lee didn't like slavery anyway. they're brilliant about that. absolutely brilliant. they don't fool the generation that wore blue uniforms. they never lost sight of what the war was about. but once that generation was fading it became more and more and more easy to do that. and when the two most important films in our history in terms of their social impact both give a straight lost cause take on things, "birth of a nation" and

"gone with the wind," no other film even close to those in their impact, that's a powerful -- "gone with the wind" has affected more people's understanding of the civil war than everything all of us has done multiplied by you pick the number and put together. it's true. and ted turner loves it. it's still on all the time. >> but our books are still on sale just in case -- anyway. not to mention that by 1900 there were 9 million black people, not only 4 1/2 million black people growing and growing and growing in -- race is at the heart of how this story played out to say the least. >> just a quick demurral. it's good to be realistic about how much scholars can change things. but you know, and i don't know much about -- know nothing about grade school and high school textbooks, but i wonder how many students of american history are asked to read alexander stevens' cornerstone speech. i mean, that would be a pretty

effective antidote to the argument that the civil war was not about slavery. there it is. laid right out. jefferson was -- >> a monitor in our audience actually has written -- >> i think scholars by bringing to light the documents of our past that are frank and open about the racial ideology of the confederacy can make a contribution. and i'd hope people read those and confront what they mean. >> i've always imagined that the reason scholars seem drowned out -- i never got my stake, by the way. when i got -- did you get a stake? i wasn't issued my stake. but the reason -- >> gary has several broken ones. >> you get it when you write a book the confederacy -- >> okay. >> the story of the lost cause has been mobilized around a set of political projects. this goes without saying, i think it's the premise of all of this, that it's the political projects that have been

pervasive over the last 150 years which find useful material in the story of the lost cause that i think propels it forward and make scholars sometimes relatively marginal in the conversation because it's being driven by political projects of -- you know, of huge impoverty and significance. i'm reminded of the film "the birth of a nation." the character, ben cameron, right? ben cameron is the hero of the klansmen. so one of the great unknown features of american constitutional history is that ben cameron is modeled on a guy named rufus bratton from up country, south carolina. and rufus bratton is the defendant in a case called united states versus aimsly, which is the first case under the 14th amendment to reach the united states supreme court. in early 1872 it gets argued. and in a very, very telling moment the united states supreme court ducks the question entirely, manages in the case of the man who will be the model

for the klansman and the film "birth of a nation" to avoid saying anything about the 14th amendment. this is unknown because the case is united states versus avery because bratton comes alphabetically after avery. so it just goes unnoticed. but really from the very beginning the political project of telling the story of the lost cause has had this political project around the constitutional amendments. >> just -- the sense of this theme of what's the appeal of the lost cause is coming up. i agree with everything that's been said. and much of it is -- probably boils down to a sort of code for racism. no question about it. but on the other hand, we got some literary folks up here and plenty out there. you know, stories of losers have an appeal. stories about suffering have an appeal. now, the story of black suffering was repressed and suppressed and kept invisible in our history for a very long time and is only now beginning --

it's still got a long way to go until it arrives at the central place that it deserves, but it's i hope getting there. but if you think about the history of literature, pro meetingi metheus or king lear or willie lohman, people like to read stories about losers. and the south has claimed that story. so that has a certain visceral appeal, especially if you don't think about it too much. >> well, i think just picking up on what both gary and andy just said, it's also i think very important to think about -- you were alluding to this. we don't just want to read about -- we want to read about specific people who lost. we don't want to read about how african-americans suffered post reconstruction. and i want to use that. it's one thing to think about what the incentive of the lost cause is and why people want to accept it. i think it's also very important to think about the disincentive for accepting not simply that the civil war was about slavery, but as you so brilliantly just

put it that it actually wasn't about slavery, it was about the expansion of slavery. that's a very depressing notion, i think, for a nation that premises itself on freedom and liberty. i strongly suspect that if we accepted the academic story, we the entire country, for what the civil war was, the premacy it had, that it would have effects beyond those that are immediately apparent. i think people believe things because they want to, and i think that should never be disregarded. there are very good reasons for not believing the civil war were about slavery. this would take us into all sorts of probably policy questions about affirmative action. when really -- and again, it's almost -- i'm almost ashamed to say this. but as an african-american i had some sense that the civil war was about slavery. i was shocked just how much it was about slavery. it was totally -- again, as an african-american, completely

depressing. david in his lectures has that great quote, and i make use of it all the time. i should start sending you a fee or something. >> that's fine. >> when you begin to understand -- >> we'll talk. >> yes. we should. we should. because this really -- this changed my whole career path, actually. but when you start to consider that african-american slaves as property, as you so brilliant liu put it, were worth all the property put together in the country, that -- i mean, when you start thinking about natchez, mississippi and all the millionaires who lived there, more per capita than anywhere in the country. do i have that right? >> state of mississippi. >> state of -- this is like depressing. it really will cause to you rearrange how you think about yourself in reference to your country. so if millions of people -- not millions. sorry. hundreds of thousands of people were willing to die for the expansion of slavery and the good guys were only willing to die to not see it expanded, you know, it just so happened by luck, by chance that we got an emancipation, who are we, then?

what are we then? are we the land of the free? i think it poses deep existential questions that are just hard to get to. >> is this why you've written this stunning piece about why don't blacks study the civil war more, is this the nub of it, that somehow when you really do get back to the civil war you find that it's not such a pretty clean moment of jubilee, it's not the country -- well, it's the country freeing the slaves but it's not just the country freeing the slaves. it's an ugly, terrible, wartime process -- >> no, i -- and for everybody. even -- there are as an african-american, there are these moments of pride, but it -- it is sort of -- i wrote this -- all this writing about how it wasn't tragic. but it is. there's no way to look at it. >> we're up here for two hours, it's not about tragedy. >> it's a great conversation. but you can't look at 600,000 people died and cheer at all. it's bigger than that and there are other questions there, but

even for african-americans, you get like the riots in memphis afterwards, and you read about people being raped and everything. there's nothing good, at least in the immediate sense. maybe there's a long term, but it will not make you feel good immediately. >> but you know -- >> there's one good -- >> i was going to say that one thing that really strikes me about the way we write about the american civil war, when you read a lot about other civil wars, is we don't write about the trauma of civil war. this romantic story isn't just out there in the popular version. we as scholars have our own place in the redemptive purposes of this war so we can talk about this war in a way that's really difficult to explain to anybody who's asking you about it. and i think one of the costs of that in scholarship as well as in popular history is that the normal focus on the suffering and trauma that goes along with civil war, the -- just thinking about contraband camps as

refugee camps, for example, using a word that puts them like in other wars where there's displaced -- huge numbers of displaced people. okay. yes, the slaves are being freed, but they first have to survive the war. and they're being completely brutalized by both armies, by their masters and mistresses. i mean, that's just one part of the story. and then there are a million other human stories of suffering and trauma. and the other thing that really interests me about this lost cause that's so obvious but i think probably worth saying here is that there's two versions of the love of the lost cause or, know, crudely put, at least two populations for this. one is the people for whom it's an ancestral history. and that is still out there and very difficult to deal with when you encounter it in public settin settings. but if that was our only problem -- >> it's about honoring my great great grandfather. >> exactly. and that's difficult. but if that was the only population for the lost cause, we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in. there's another population that uses -- that is in california

a and, you know, that is just using it as a metaphor for conservatism and what they regard as opposition to the overreaching of the federal government government. and you know, these things are different. but that's part of the reason why the lost cause continues to appeal. i mean, i know -- and there's a romantic cast to it, which is why people who have no familial connection to the confederacy somehow identify with that cause and the experience of daefs aefd powerlessness that came afterwards. >> it's a formula that can fit a lot of causes. >> it's not just an ancestral attachment. >> andy? >> just wanted to comment on one of the difficulties in coming to terms with the civil war, it seems to me. progressive-minded people, which is a somewhat self-serving

description but one that we'd agree describes most of the academic profession, that is, people who consider themselves liberal, left-leaning people, like the outcome of the civil war, obviously. the outcome of the civil war was the end of slavery. >> it was a good war. >> it was a good war in that sense. but those same people, which i include myself generally speaking, have not lately seen a war that we liked. that is, the idea that there could be a war which begins as a war to contain slavery but evolves into a war to kill and end slavery is -- it scrambles the mind because we talk about the fog of war and the mission shift in war. and once you unleash the gods of war only bad things happen is our general view of modern history. >> this is good mission creep. >> it's good mission creep. exactly. a great phrase. so what do we do with that? i've asked some of my colleagues

who certainly there were a few outliers in favor of the iraq war because they thought there were really weapons of mass destruction there. most people in our world were against it. and yet retrospectively we're for the civil war. so that's a confusion i think that we haven't quite resolved. >> i can't help saying that i don't think most of the men who volunteered and put on blue uniforms would have said the war was about the extension of slavery. they would have said it was about preservation of the union. and that meant something to them that we have lost. to them it had a very specific meaning. they saw slaveholders as oligarchs. they didn't see them as part of the tradition from the founding generation. they believed small d democracy was at stake. they didn't believe it existed in the south because of the oligarchy rule. they believed there was both a larger project in place in north america, that is, saving the handiwork of the founders and chastising these oligarchs, but they also looked across the

ocean and said this -- democracy hasn't worked anywhere. the revolutions of the late 1840s failed everywhere. democracy is in retreat. if it's going to be saved anywhere, it has to be here. and if these oligarchs can destroy the nation just because the presidential candidate they favored wasn't elected in an election that no one said was crooked, they just didn't like the result. then the oligarchs and the aristocrats and the monarchists are going to be able to say we told you people aren't capable. we all think lincoln said it and everybody said oh-a that must be the case. but in fact, even barely literate soldiers said almost precisely the same thing. lincoln, in his usual way, captures brilliantly what is really very widely held among the white loyal citizenry. so i can't even give them credit for going to war, most of them, to limit -- the democrats sure as hell didn't. i mean, 45% of the north are

democrats. they're not on board with anything relating to -- >> it's that other democratic party in that other century. >> when does it become, though, like a semantic question, because if the thing that's threatening the union is the extension of slavery, you may be for union but the thing that you're actually fighting that's threatening the union is slavery, then -- >> they would have said the thing is -- >> isn't that why they dismembered the union? >> yes, but those are two different things. why you fight to save the union. why you decide to cesecede theye related of course but they're different questions. >> i really -- go ahead, john. >> there's a military history dimension i think to the lost cause, and this is an application of the loser stories are popular stories. i think -- i believe i'm right when i say there's an underpopulation of union side re-enactors.

>> yes. >> and this is not a coincidence. i think it's not strange. i think in the era of modern industrialized warfare it doesn't provide opportunities for heroism. that is, heroism on the battlefield is unavailable after the rise of certain forms of weaponry. so pickett's charge, it would be really pointless to be a unside re-enactor in pickett's charge, but to be a confederate side re-enactor is to try to see through the triumph of heroism in the face of mass industrial slaughter. and there's an appeal to that story which i think is an important -- there's a military history side of this. >> what about black re-enactors? what do you guys know about that? i've been meeting a lot of black re-enactors out on the circuit. >> oh, yeah. >> those guys are interesting. >> my favorite experience of black re-enactors was in 1997, the 200th -- excuse me, 100th anniversary of the unveiling of the shaw memorial, the great

augusta gardens monument in boston to the 54th massachusetts. boston held an extraordinary conference around that anniversary. scholarly conference for about 2 1/2 days, a whole bunch of us giving papers on this and that, this and that. but the people who stole the show were about 100 black re-enactors who took over this event in a way. they had a whole panel, fine black re-enactors of different ages discussing what they do and why they do it. it turned out almost all of them started right after the movie "glory." they found each other after the movie "glory." >> "glory's" a watershed. >> it is a watershed in popular memory. and you've written about this. but then they started forming units and regiments and so on and so forth. and during the ceremony in front of the shaw memorial, which many of you may know i hope, not only did these 100 black re-enactors re-enact the march of the 54th in front of the monument, did formations. it was really quite moving. but one of them stood in front

of the monument on the pavement beneath the stage during the whole ceremony and kept doing a kind of about-face for an hour and a half as though he was on the monument. it was kind of a street theatre unlike anything else i've ever seen. and he got a standing ovation. he got a greater ovation than colin powell got for the keynote address. and it was a pretty good talk by colin powell, by the way. this is complicated. i've done events in the south, charlest charleston, south carolina, where we dedicated a monument to the first memorial day and a group of black re-enactors were there. these guys are serious. and they -- i no longer crack jokes about re-enactors partly because of this experience. but it also says something about my own attitudes, doesn't it? black re-enactors are the good war. all those confederate re-enactors, eh. but if you really talk to a lot of them, there are different kinds of them. some of them are out to drink

beer on a weekend, and some of them are out to just find an authenticity rush, and some of them are out to just find the past because they don't like living in the present. there are a lot of reasons people do this, but black re-enacting is -- i think -- >> is it on the rise, do you think? >> i think we reached a moment in the '90s when doing this was available to african-americans in ways it hadn't been before. and people discovered black soldiers because of "glory." >> i was in gettysburg on november 19th last year. there's a lecture, civil war lecture that's given on the anniversary of lincoln's gettysburg address. and they have -- re-enactors march in gettysburg. thousands of them. and there were a lot of black re-enactors. and they got the biggest response by far from the crowd. when they went by. >> they're cool. they're cool. they've become really cool, i mean, in re-enacting circles. i really wanted to get john talking about -- i may let

somebody ask you this. about wli about liberty and the common good and actually quotes from yesterday's supreme court in terms of legacy. but i want to allow one more question here to tan-ehisi first. this came up in my undergraduate seminar two days ago at great length. what do you think the internet is doing, will continue to do, the sheer ubiquity and democracy of the internet to not only this aspect of historical memory but historical consciousness, historical memory generally? and you're on it as much as anybody. >> right. i don't want to get in trouble here. i saw excerpts in this piece gary wrote from bloggers -- >> i wasn't going to say he wrote a piece about bloggers -- >> i would love to see it. there are two aspects. the first is it really has

created a disparate -- a wide. i shouldn't say disparate. a widespread audience for the kind of lost causism that we've heard denounced up here. that's the bad thing. the whole black -- there you go. it's all over. i think it's gotten a kind of legitimacy on the internet that it might not have otherwise. i think the internet's a huge part of that. i'll talk about it from my experience, and that is this. i was always someone who considered themselves somewhat of a history buff. even though i dropped out of college, i kept history as a primary interest of mine. it was what most of my reading was about. and i took a break around 2008 after my first book came out, and i was greatly looking forward to this moment where i would be able to begin reading again as a fan and not as someone who was writing a book. i was so happy about that. >> god, i can't even remember doing that. >> no one told me you were going to lose that, that it would all be about your work.

i went back and read a biography about ida b. wells. and in the background was this thing about the civil war and reconstruction. i said i'll read about recrux. i read another book about reconstruction. the civil war started to loom a little bit larger. at that point i was blogging. and one of the things i do on the blog is i always talk about what i'm reading. so you know, there would be these kind of faint references to the civil war and one day someone said, you should really check out -- this was a commenter. just an anonymous commenter. you should really check out james mcpherson's "battle cry of freedom." and i can't even give words to what happened after that. but in short, i'm here now largely because of the internet. and it's a weird thing because for most of my career i was a print journalist. but the internet offers a kind of obviously interactivity. if it's a properly curated conversation, the crowd is much smarter than you really think it is. if you clear the way.

people can tell you what you're wrong about, what you're right about, and they'll be intelligent. i mean, i think i've gotten some of your -- i came to most of your work through the internet. some guy e-mailed me one day and said hey, this guy david blight, there's this lecture series up. it was on the internet. i went it and watched it. and it absolutely blew me away. this was recommended to me by the crowd. we have a very, very different relationship. i don't have to presume to be right. they can be right, they can be directing me, i could be taking a seminar from them. so i think this sort of democracy of it for me is just extre extremely, extremely, extremely exciting. it's not the usual position that a writer finds himself in. you don't usually get the opportunity to go somewhere and say, hey, i don't know anything about this, why don't you tell me? but you can do that on the internet. and it's okay. there's no sort of presumption of authority. that's just been intensely liberating for me. it's been path altering in a way

that i just never expected. >> any other points of view on the internet, or you want to pass? >> what do you suppose -- >> can i just say i hope all of you guys blog. i really, really do. because -- i'm sorry. i just want to add this really quick. one of the big, big problems and one of my great frustrations is the wall, like jay store. once you have some access to jay store and that really helps, but most people do not. and there are so many -- >> we need to get you a yale library card. >> yes. there are so many exciting things you that guys are doing and it's not even -- a lot of it isn't even that hard to read. but getting it out to -- because that's the rap on historians, right? the rap is it's so hard to read. but it's actually not true. it's actually not that hard to read. >> it's true sometimes. >> yes, yes, yes. but i really -- getting historians to the public, taz really been something i've been on. so i hope you guys take up the cause yourself. sorry. go ahead. >> if the firewall comes down, we'll have a test of that. and we can't afford that test.

i think that's the -- >> i was just going to say i know it's the sort of very, very predictable whining, but i'm curious about your perspective on this and those of you who spend more time blogging and things. when you do a piece like for the "new york times" website. i did one on the confederate constitution, by the way. which love doing. they blew the production values. you couldn't read things. they had this cool idea that they should have a manuscript copy of the confederate constitution, and there's this fiction that it's a copy of the u.s. constitution, which it is not. and so i wrote an introduction and then these little hyperlinks explaining what the difference was in each place where they significantly changed the constitution. so you can scroll over the document and these links pop up and i get to explain what words they changed and what difference it made. and that was a really, really cool thing to do. but the conversation that went on after it was one of the most polarized conversations i've ever seen in my life. and it wasn't encouraging. it was really kind of

disturbing. and it didn't seem to make anybody think anything except they were right to start with, that all the academics are left-wing morons and you know -- >> elitists. >> and elitists. and the confederacy, there really was a fine -- this was a fine constitution for a fine country, that we're making it up about slavery. even though you're going through the thing, you know, the w0rd "slavery" appears in the confederate constitution, does not appear in the u.s. constitution. they write a clause saying that their own congress can never, ever write a law limiting the right of property and slaves, which comes to bite them when they want to enlist men in the army. they can't free them. they've tied their own hands, which is why they have to go begging to the states. they do not have a clause that says the states have a right of secession. these are interesting things. but the conversation that ensued was really, really vitriolic and polarized. there was no middle ground there at all. >> it's free.

i got -- i just got called the other day for a piece i did on slate.com. just another yale geriatric professor. which i take issue with. >> the problem, though is -- this is actually -- it's not either of you guys's fault. the problem is we've taken the notion of democracy a little too far and it has not gotten into people's heads on the internet yet that you really should curate your comments, that you really should have a goal, something -- not just an open space for people to spout off. >> keep telling them that. >> yeah. i always try to explain it. i said look -- i have a blog. i'm hosting a space. i would not let you come into my house and insult one of my guests. i would ask you to leave. that's what would happen in my space. if you want the space to be elevated, you have to treat it that way. that's our fault. we haven't quite gotten it through our heads that we should commit resources for it being that way. i'm sorry that happened. it happens 99% of the time. >> there are a hundred other legacies we could take up here, t